The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
One of the issues with deploying network devices is that although physically installing network devices may be relatively straightforward, the installed network devices must then be configured, which can be difficult and require a high level of user knowledge and involvement. For example, configuring a router with secure network connections, such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), can be tedious and difficult to troubleshoot for end users who are not experienced in such tasks. In corporate environments, it is not uncommon for deployment specialists to manually configure network devices before they are installed at their destinations. Although this reduces the burden on end users, it does not address all of the issues. In some situations, a large number of network devices need to be deployed as quickly and inexpensively as possible. This is difficult to do using conventional approaches because of the human resources that are required to manually configure a large number of network devices. Mistakes can also be made during the manual configuration process, which can require reconfiguring some network devices. Furthermore, corporate policies that drive the configuration of network devices are often not static and can change unexpectedly. Thus, last minute changes in corporate policies can also require reconfiguring network devices that have already been configured according to a prior corporate policy, which adds to the cost and can cause delays in deployment.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need for an approach for deploying network devices that does not suffer from limitations of prior approaches.